The overall capacities of broadband satellites are increasing exponentially, and such capacity increases present unique challenges in the associated ground system and network designs. The goal of the system designers, system operators, and service providers is to support and provide efficient, robust, reliable and flexible services utilizing such high capacity satellite systems. Further, in a shared bandwidth network, the wireless spectrum or bandwidth is shared by multiple remote nodes or terminals. Such broadband satellite networks typically support a variety of services utilizing multiple traffic types of differing quality of service (QoS) characteristics (e.g., Internet traffic, bulk data transfers, and real-time (RT) traffic, such as voice over IP (VOIP) or interactive or streaming video). For example, RT traffic has strict latency, jitter and packet loss requirements, where, in order to satisfy such requirements, it would be costly (e.g., from a channel efficiency standpoint) to provide continuous, reserved bandwidth for a certain remote terminal running real-time applications. Additionally, one or more remote terminals can each have multiple real-time flows, which may arrive at the same time.
In a current time division multiple access (TDMA) system, for example, a VOIP call may be assigned TDMA slots with fixed positions periodically. As such, as multiple calls come in and go out of the network randomly, gaps would be present in the available slots for non-real-time (NRT) traffic, resulting in either higher overhead in using the slots or enhanced complexity in transmitting NRT traffic bursts. Additionally, the seamless convergence of RT and NRT traffic presents further challenges for efficient spectrum utilization and QoS assurance.
Moreover, in such shared bandwidth systems, it is difficult to discern real-time traffic flows from other flows, to allocate the correct amount of bandwidth for the real-time flows, to allocate bandwidth in a manner that reduces latency and jitter of the real-time flows, to manage multiple real-time flows from multiple different remote terminals of the network in an efficient manner, and to provide satisfactory performance (e.g., to facilitate an acceptable user experience) during the setup of the real-time traffic flows for the respective applications.
What is needed, therefore, is a system and methods to address the challenges supporting real-time traffic flows for respective real-time services, providing for assured QoS and efficient spectrum utilization (e.g., in a shared bandwidth broadband satellite network that supports convergent multimedia services).